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A ring diacritic may appear above (◌̊) or below (◌̥) letters. It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts.

The Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Walloon character Å (å) is typically seen as an A with a ring above. However, in the languages in which it is used, the letter is seen as a unique symbol, rather than an A with a diacritic.

Other characters with a ring diacritic are Ů and ů (a Latin U with ring above). These characters are used in the Czech language (where the ring is known as a kroužek), together with háček and čárka (like an acute accent) above many other letters. This vowel "ů" shows how the pronunciation of various words evolved during the centuries. For example, the word "kůň" (a horse; pronounced [ku:ɲ]) used to be written "kóň", which evolved, along with pronunciation, into "kuoň". Ultimately, the vowel [o] disappeared completely, and it is only kept as the ring above "u". The letters ů and ú have the pronunciation (long [u:]). For historical reasons, ů can never be the first letter of the word; unlike ú is always the first letter of the word or the word root.

The ring is also used in Bolognese (a dialect of Emiliano-Romagnolo language) to distinguish the sound /ɑ/ (å) from /a/ (a).

Ring above has been used in Lithuanian Cyrillic alphabet promoted by Russian authorities at the last quarter of 19th century in the letter У̊ / у̊, used to represent the /u̯ɔ/ diphthong (now written uo in contemporary Lithuanian orthography).

Many more characters can be created in Unicode using the 'combining ring above' U+030A, including the above mentioned у̊ (Cyrillic у with ring above) or even ń̊ (n with acute and ring above). The standalone ring above symbol has the codepoint U+02DA.

Unicode encodes "combining ring below" at U+0325 (  ̥ ). The diacritic is used in IPA to indicate voicelessness, and in Indo-European studies to indicate syllabicity (r̥ corresponding to IPA [ɹ̩]).

Half rings also exist as diacritic marks, these are characters U+0351 (combining left half ring above) and U+0357 (combining left half ring below). These characters may be used with the International Phonetic Alphabet. They are here given with the lowercase a: a͑ and a͗. These may or may not display correctly in your user agent.

Other, similar signs are in use in Armenian: the 'left half ring above' U+0559 ( ՙ ), and the Armenian comma or 'right half ring above' U+055A ( ՚ ).

The ring as a diacritic mark should not be confused with the dot above or comma above diacritic marks, with the combing o above (U+0366 ͦ), or with the degree sign °. Additionally this symbol Å is the proper ångström sign.

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents